


When imitation and experience don't make a dent, try reflection. Or maybe therapy.

by etrangerici



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Booker | Sebastien le Livre Needs Therapy, Canon Temporary Character Death, Gen, Nile Freeman is a Delight, Quynh takes no shit from sad French disasters, There's A Tag For That
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-03
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:01:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26273038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/etrangerici/pseuds/etrangerici
Summary: "By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest."  -ConfuciusBooker's exile isn't quite what he expected. That may be a good thing.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nile Freeman, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Quynh | Noriko
Comments: 21
Kudos: 203





	When imitation and experience don't make a dent, try reflection. Or maybe therapy.

**Author's Note:**

> I had a whole epic crossover thing percolating but I'm not loving it's implications, so here's some HumanDisaster!Booker stumbling his way towards acceptance. It's possible I might come back to this. I do love my sad frenchman and the women who take no shit from him.
> 
> The Quynh and Booker buddy-movie theme was definitely inspired by j_gabrielle's works.

For six months in a tiny Paris flat, Booker is an unregenerate (yet still regenerating) drunk. 

Then Quynh shows up in his kitchen and nearly scares the piss out of him. She’s sane(-ish) in an incredibly disturbing way. She is entirely thinly-veiled rage and pain and, as he discovers when she lashes out, every bit the pit viper the others called her. She kills him twice that first day. 

He finds it deeply unsettling that, when he revives with her standing over him, cleaning the knife (his own) with which she stabbed him, he feels perfectly at home in her presence. It feels like grace. Or, perhaps his death drive is stronger than he’d thought (fuck you, Sigmund), and he’s even more of a shattered husk of a human than previously suspected. 

Within two weeks, she has him liquidating a small but profitable investment fund and buying her a ridiculous penthouse apartment virtually on top of Pont Neuf with the spires of Notre Dame filling every window. He can’t imagine the church is a welcome sight to her, but then again, she survived the church’s best efforts, maybe this iconic cathedral is a reminder of that triumph. Whatever she thinks, every morning she watches the sun rise from the roof-deck, curled up in a Bertoia patio chair among a riot of ferns, rosemary, lavender, and thyme, dappled by lemon and fig trees, sipping her strong, sweet coffee.

He stays with her for months. She wrings every bit of knowledge out of him: technology, dialect drifts, new languages, geopolitics, literature, music, military history, economics, society’s changing mores, religious movements, everything he can think of and more. He has never felt so sharp and alive, even taking fire in battle with Andy. He becomes accustomed to his adrenaline response being triggered not by violence but their debates. She is vicious in cross-examination as he recounts everything he can remember of their missions. He is given no quarter, no chance to gloss over anything, allowed no half-truths, and no tired justifications. She demands that he tell her what happened after the mission. Not to them, not the cleanup, but to those touched by their actions. He reaches out to Copley, asks for his research. She pores over their footprints across history. Something in her detached, clinical approach lances a wound he didn’t realize he carried. He loses a few nights’ sleep as he investigates some of Copley’s leads further, needing to know and yet dreading the long-term impact of missions that he has never been able to set aside. 

Her voracious appetite for experiences and understanding stirs something in him. He remembers the spark in Nile’s eyes, how her simple presence seemed to breathe new life into all of them in Merrick’s lab. How much she cared, almost right from the beginning, balancing self-possession and detachment with a compassionate heart. He encourages Quynh to reach out to Andy and the others. She tells him, not yet, and suggests another outing. He goes along with it.

She amasses a wardrobe of designer clothes in rich creams and jeweled tones, nothing but the softest of fabrics. She spends hours in small markets, tasting cheeses, meats, fruits. She buys spices and teas and coffees. They spend a week with some of his more dubious contacts testing weapons and she rapidly gets up to speed on current armaments. He finds someone to hand-forge her a set of knives to her exact specifications. He commissions a bow and she experiments with carbon-fiber arrows and synthetic fletching. They debate progress versus tradition and test each in performance.

They explore every inch of the Louvre, then it’s off to Versailles, back to the Tuileries, the Musee de l’Orangerie, the Musee d’Orsay, the Centre Pompidou. She falls a little in love with Mondrian. They attend the theatre, the opera, the ballet, the symphony, jazz clubs. He steers her away from raves and the wilder dance clubs, but they eat and drink their way across the city. Despite himself, he starts to relax, he enjoys her company, he begins to pay attention to the life around them. 

Eventually, because of course she saw his stupidity the same way he and Nile saw her suffering, she asks for details on what happened at Merrick’s lab. She is sphynx-like, hearing about his betrayal and the torture of Nicky and Joe, but only presses him on the fate of Dr. Kozak and her research. He admits that, as far as he knows, Copley was the one to clean up their trail at the lab. She smiles at Booker and smooths his hair back, dropping a kiss on his forehead when she retires to her room. 

He doesn’t sleep very well that night.

The next morning when he rises late, she is sipping her coffee in an uncanny echo of her appearance in his kitchen six months before. She demands Copley’s contact information and then asks him what he plans to accomplish in his next 99 years. 

He gives her Copley’s phone number and takes his coffee out to the roof-deck. He spends the rest of the day mainlining caffeine and staring across the Seine, thinking. He refuses to admit that he’d had even the briefest hope that he could follow her back into the family fold.

After a few days' consideration, Booker decides to remove himself from his usual haunts and try something new. He packs the most functional of the clothes Quynh had pressed upon him and visits a handful of his caches throughout the city for necessities. He spends the evenings on his computer and reaches out to a few not-too-illicit contacts. Finally, one afternoon, he hands Quyhn his key to the apartment, accepts another kiss to his forehead and a too-tight hug, and takes a taxi to Charles de Gaulle, where Sebastien Borde, trust fund brat and perpetual student, buys a first class ticket to Washington D.C.

Booker’s chosen alias, Sebastien Borde, has a student visa, a French passport, and a dilettante’s transcript from the Sorbonne. Booker had actually spent time at the University, gaining access to a young tech genius’s research before it became common knowledge and using it for one the the team’s more successful jobs. As there’d been nothing illegal or particularly reprehensible about either the job or the persona, it’s simple enough to update the information and bolster his 'trust funds' before leaving France. None of the team were particularly fond of America and, for Nile’s sake, they would likely avoid it for quite some time.

He expects that Quynh will be joining Andy and the others. Quynh has his number, as does Copley, but he doesn’t really expect anyone to use it.

***

Booker is surprised to discover that he doesn’t hate DC. The heat of August is familiar, though the humidity is a bit much. He finds a studio apartment a couple blocks from Dupont Circle, convenient to sources of good coffee, liquor, food, and books, and an easy ride to the University. He expects the multitudes to remind him of Nile, Joe, and Nicky, but they don’t. None of the sweet summer children surrounding him trip any of his wires. They all have just enough situational awareness to recognize bigots and avoid being flattened by tourists and taxis but offer little threat. The belligerent avoid him instinctively. He finds that it’s easy to be alone but not grindingly lonely in a city of transients. People from all over the world alight in DC for a time, then scatter. It is a city of amorphous, easily shifting communities and tenuous but well-meaning connections.

In the weeks before courses start, he sets up his apartment and explores the city. Months with Quynh instilled in him the habit of movement and he now finds it unbearable to stay shut in with nothing to do for too long. He begins exploring his neighborhood and the university campus, checking sight-lines and security measures. It’s not that he plans to go about fully-armed, but he needs to know where the problem areas lay. He systematically expands his circle, finding parks, running paths, markets, useful shortcuts and blind alleys and dead-ends in case he needs them.

He covers one wall of the hallway winding into his studio with bookshelves. He buys a queen-size platform bed and a memory foam mattress. He buys two sets of sheets, a quilt and a pair of pillows. He uses the wooden box from his first case of wine as a temporary bedside table for a lamp. He won’t buy a television and he refuses to consider why (no one else with whom to shout at football matches) but he could probably render the next Avatar film on the computer he builds. If he’s going be here for a while and not get shot at (he hopes), then he’s going to take advantage. Quynh has apparently ruined him for asceticism.

He stumbles upon an estate sale full of well-built mid-century modern furniture and accessories and crushes the hopes of an antique dealer by buying up the best pieces. The nephew who is selling off his uncle’s treasures offers to deliver the hoard and Booker accepts with something approaching genuine gratitude. The clean lines and simplicity remind him of Quynh’s bracing lack of sentiment. Seeing his little world come together - nothing hidden or obscured by gilt or ornamentation - settles something in him.

He receives the first text while looking through art history surveys in a rare book shop in Georgetown. 

[unknown] _Got ur # from Q. How u doing?_

He stares at the screen until another patron excuses themselves to get past him in the aisle. He pockets his phone and moves back to collapse into a chair in the corner. He pulls out the phone and stares some more, torn between replying (he will) and blocking her number (he would never). His sentence was ‘no contact for one hundred years.’ Six months with Quynh could be considered a violation already, but Booker knows to his marrow that he is not strong enough to deny contact with Nile. Let the others damn him for it. 

_Fine. How are you adjusting?_ He sends and saves her contact information. 

[Not just a river] _O, u know, training is a bitch and so is A_

He can’t help his snort. He offers her an out: _Should you be texting me?_

[Not just a river] _I do what I want_  
[Not just a river] _Unless u don’t want me to, I’m gonna stay in touch. Gird your loins_

He shakes his head and can’t help but smile. _As you will, then._

[Not just a river] _U bet. Gotta go. B good._

He replies, _à bientôt_

Booker sits, an unexpected warmth blooming in his chest. He takes a deep breath and goes back to browsing with a lighter heart.


End file.
